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- Graduated University, building a new Obsidian plugin, and notes on Excellent Advice for Living & The Pragmatic Programmer
Graduated University, building a new Obsidian plugin, and notes on Excellent Advice for Living & The Pragmatic Programmer
I graduated with my Master's in Software Engineering, and it went great. I'm building a new Obsidian plugin - an AI voice assistant that just works. Updates to PodNotes and QuickAdd. Book Notes on Excellent Advice for Living and The Pragmatic Programmer.
Hey friends,
I hope you've had a great week.
A lot has happened since my last email. I graduated with my Master’s in Software Engineering!
I've been working on a project to improve NASA's Mars mission models using AI and machine learning. We achieved exactly what we hoped for with this project. We recreated their current models for analysing rock samples and then developed new, more accurate ones using the latest machine learning techniques. These models performed really well and the techniques we used ended up serving as inspiration for the work they’re doing on the missions going forward.
It has been a fantastic experience working on my thesis along with two of my friends and long-time collaborators. Our collaboration with the members of the missions and supervisors was incredibly exciting, and I learned a lot during the project.
And it was fun to make the local news to top off the year-long project: AAU (EN), TV2 Nord (DA), LinkedIn (DA) / EN, and others.
Now I’m enjoying a summer-vacation to take a quick breather before going on my next adventure. I’m headed to Rome, Italy tomorrow to spend time and enjoy life with my fantastic partner.
While I have been enjoying the summer, I’m also not the type of person that can just turn off their mind and sit back. I have a ton of exciting things I want to show you, so let’s dive in!
What I've made for you
Book notes
Excellent Advice for Living by Kevin Kelly. A short book with simple bits of wisdom. |
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas I enjoyed this book. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but I would still recommend it, especially to new programmers. At times it felt like they didn’t have enough to say to cover the length of the book (violating DRY… ;)), so I skimmed those parts. Especially towards the end. |
I wrote and published my Summer Paper Reading List 2024. It’s a curated list of key papers on machine learning, neural networks, transformers, and distributed systems.
If you have any recommendations, let me know!
New Obsidian plugin: Voice-controlled Obsidian with AI
I’m having a lot of fun building a new plugin for Obsidian.
It’s the AI-assistant I’ve always wanted.
Something that… just works. Ask for what you want, and it goes and does it.
Want it to create a new note on the economies of scale? Just ask.
Want it to listen to what you’re saying and write down your thoughts as bullet points, but add tasks along the way based on what you said? Just ask.
Want it to add some thoughts under a specific heading, but you’re currently working on another paragraph? Just ask.
I’ve really been enjoying actually talking to my notes. I’ve used it extensively for journaling. It’s freeing to just talk free-form, and then it all appears in beautifully formatted text.
The plugin is currently in private beta. I’ll be opening access soon!
I'm building a new plugin for @obsdmd.
Announcement coming soon.
Here's a small teaser...
— Christian Bager Bach Houmann (@chrisbbh)
12:51 PM • Jul 9, 2024
New voice-controlled AI plugin for Obsidian is coming along nicely!
Today I shipped
🞄 An Edit functionality that can edit any file exactly how you tell it to.
🞄 Status updates so the plugin can tell you what it's doing.
🞄 A quick-transcribe feature.— Christian Bager Bach Houmann (@chrisbbh)
10:51 PM • Jul 12, 2024
PodNotes for Obsidian
PodNotes is the plugin I’ve built for Obsidian that acts as a fully-fledged podcast app within Obsidian.
I recently made it even better:
PodNotes for @obsdmd can now transcribe podcast episodes for you.
No more "what was it they said exactly?" x.com/i/web/status/1…
— Christian Bager Bach Houmann (@chrisbbh)
3:11 PM • Jul 16, 2024
Shipped a nice redesign for the PodNotes podcast search and overview today.
Much easier to add and remove podcasts now.
And I made it easier to import from your previous podcast app ;)
— Christian Bager Bach Houmann (@chrisbbh)
8:30 PM • Jul 18, 2024
QuickAdd for Obsidian
QuickAdd's AI Assistant now supports:
the new GPT-4o-mini model, featuring 128k input tokens & 16k output tokens
Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet's 8k output tokens (beta)
Notably, GPT-4o-mini is super cheap, running at 15 cents / 1m input tokens and 60 cents / 1m output tokens.
Updated Zotero Importer
I recently updated my Zotero importer for @obsdmd.
If you read a lot of papers, this is for you!
You can now:
🞄 Import and sort your annotations by page, date, or index,
🞄 Import notes from your entire Zotero library (not just the most recent ones!),
🞄 Access more metadata… x.com/i/web/status/1…— Christian Bager Bach Houmann (@chrisbbh)
9:52 PM • Jul 12, 2024
What else?
I’ve rebuilt my website in Astro. I was getting a bit tired of the build times of my Next.js website, and have been wanting to fix it. Nothing wrong with Next.js, I still really like it, but it didn’t fit the use-case of a static blog as well as Astro.
And there’s the nice benefit of it being easier to manage the content I’ve published.
Something that really sparks joy on the new website is the books page.
There’s just something beautiful about seeing your favourite books laid out together. Maybe this fascination is why I love browsing bookshops and libraries.
And it’s the closest I get, being a mostly-digital reader.
The updated books page.
Quote
You don’t need more time because
you already have all the time
that you will ever get;
you need more focus.